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Monte Schulz to unveil “This Side of Jordan” at Book Expo

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Fantagraphics has put out a press release about Monte Schulz’s new novel, “This Side of Jordan”:

FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS ANNOUNCES THE ACQUISITION OF THIS SIDE OF JORDAN, A NOVEL BY MONTE SCHULZ

THIS SIDE OF JORDAN, by MONTE SCHULZ, will be unveiled at the 2009 Book Expo America in New York City, May 29-31, with an appearance by the author on Saturday, May 30, at 2:30PM in the Autographing Area.

Monte Schulz

The novel is described as, “a tapestry of American life in the summer before the economic crash of 1929, and a quintessential novel of the rural Midwest offered unexpectedly as a crime thriller.” You can pre-order it from Amazon at this link. Monte says “This Side of Jordan” is very different from his first novel, but like “Down by the River” I’m sure a ripping good read is guaranteed for all!

Beav it to Cleaver

Netflix Watch Instantly on the Roku means TV Land no longer exists for me. I was watching an episode from the third (1959) season of “Leave it to Beaver” tonight when I was surprised by a brief guest appearance. June is at a women’s club party, hosted by Mrs. Harrison.

Leave it to Beaver

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/MAY/Beaver01.mp3]

They don’t explain what sort of trouble Mrs. Mondello’s daughter is in, but by having the ladies point out that she’s eighteen, parents in the audience can imagine for themselves. This is the sort of clever scripting for family TV shows that later disappeared. After “All in the Family” premiered, TV comedies dealing with personal issues were about as subtle as a backhoe breaking a gas main.

A year after her appearance on Beaver, the actress playing Mrs. Harrison would be heard on TV again, and her voice has been ever-present ever since, even today, ten years after her death. Listen carefully to the audio clip. She’s out of character here, but she played somebody you’ve heard a thousand times.

Leave it to Beaver

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/MAY/Beaver02.mp3]

Never a DELL moment

I was going to post an “e-toy update” but now my primary PC — a one-year-old DELL Inspiron 530 — won’t start. Not even in safe mode. After running a full scan yesterday, of course. AAUGH!

So I’m on the Acer netbook. I won’t bother trying to figure out what’s wrong. I’ll just go straight to an installation of Windows.

(Later) OK…. I shall not die this day. Not yet, anyway. I ran Safe Mode so it would go to a command prompt, and I was able to launch explorer.exe (the desktop GUI interface). Running chkdsk revealed some file system problems, so I set chkdsk to run with the fix option on the next restart. Why did NTFS develop a problem? Don’t know, but I won’t ever run the Verizon system optimizer again, that’s for sure. It’s the one thing I did differently yesterday than I usually do when doing a maintenance scan.

(Later still) Well… the first restart after the last thing I wrote resulted in a BSOD with PFN_LIST_CORRUPT. So I most likely have a hard memory error, or a bad device driver. I removed the Cisco VPN and its virtual adapter, and the error hasn’t returned. But just in case I burned a bootable Microsoft Memory Test CD.

Snoopy flies in space, lands in Washington state

It’s been forty years since Snoopy flew to the Moon on Apollo 10, the last mission of the program to intentionally not land on the surface of Earth’s nearest neighbor. “Precious” seems to be the best word to describe this photo of NASA secretary Jayme Flowers holding a big Snoopy.

Jayme Flowers with Snoopy

Before Snoopy flew ’round the Moon he was a Sopwith Camel pilot, of course, battling the Red Baron in — what else? — dogfights. A traveling exhibit from the Charles M. Schulz Museum, featuring Snoopy’s most famous persona, which was inspired by a bit of boyhood whimsy by Monte Schulz, is now at the Pearson Air Museum in Vancouver, Washington. The origin of the hit song “Snoopy and the Red Baron” is murkier than is generally known, as I hope to explain one day, but for now I am pledged to remain silent.

In another bit of Peanuts news, there are apparently financial problems at the New York auction firm Illustration House, which needed a bit of nudging to make a good faith payment to the owner of a Schulz original.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/MAY/PeanutsAuction.flv 512 288]